Menu

The "Menu" is the series of windows you'll see if you click the I or C button to bring up the Stockpile or Colony screens respectively.

Stockpile: This is the colony inventory. You can access it at any time as long as you're in range of an outpost. Colonists can access this through the wonders of the magical Crate, that has some kind of interdimensional something going on, as they all connect to the same stockpile. This means you don't need to do anything to move items around, and all outposts share the same inventory. Colonists at job blocks will drop items off here, and pick up items for the next item to craft if they need it. You can craft Torches and Tinker's Tables here, but that's the only items you can craft.

Science: This is where you go to see the technologies you have/can learn. You generally need to consume items from previous researches, specific tiered items such as Scrolls of Knowledge, Tablet of Ancient Wisdom, Books of Knowledge, and points. If you can't remember the details of a recipe, you can come back here to look at it instead of going to the job block, especially if you can't remember where it's made.

Colony Points: Aside from buying stuff, you can spend points here to upgrade some things, such as: Builder Area Size (1,280,000 max), Colonist Capacity (50,000 max, this is per-outpost, not total), Digger Area Size (1,280,000 max), Health (200 at max), Banner Safe Zone (100 max, this is in all directions). The most expensive one is 100,000 points for the final safe zone upgrade, which needs 40 Steel Lockboxes.

Colony: Here you can hire colonists, change colony settings, set jobs to be be filled (or not), and do MP stuff. You can only hire up to the colonist limit, and you need sufficient beds and meals for it. Only 50 at a time though.

Under Manage Jobs you can set how many people will work on what, if you either don't have enough people, or want to disable some jobs temporarily.

Manage Owners and Diplomacy both have...something to do with MP. Ask someone who know what they do to edit this.

Under Other Colonies you can set which outpost is active when placing down stuff if your outposts are too close to each other. Otherwise it doesn't show up.

Notifications: This is where notifications of colonist deaths and Science advancements go. Check it every once in a while to see if your colonists in an outpost died, because the game doesn't actually "notify" you. You can remove groups of notifications to clean things up.